Sermon for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity

admin| 23 September 2018

“Friend, go up higher”

Friendship is the antidote to arrogance and presumption. “I have called you friends,” Jesus says to us. And here in today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable in which the crux of the matter is “Friend, go up higher.” It captures the moral of the story and scene. “For whosoever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” Such is the power and significance of divine friendship. Friendship seeks the good of each other.

“God is friendship,” Aelred of Rievaulx suggests in his wonderful 12th century treatise, Spiritual Friendship, boldly translating “God is love” into “God is friendship.” The friendship between God and man is the great wonder and mystery of the Christian faith but it connects powerfully and wonderfully with the idea and concept of friendship as it is explored in other religious and philosophical traditions.

At work in today’s Gospel parable is the idea of friendship as the counter and corrective to pride and presumption, to arrogance and domination. In the oldest literary work known to our humanity, “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” friendship is an essential element. Described by the German poet Rilke as “das Epos der Todesfurcht,” the epic of the fear of death, the epic poem is equally about the power of friendship. The friendship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu is central to the dynamic of the story and to the making of Gilgamesh as the hero of the culture as knower and doer, as the one who faces the fears of the culture and in some sense transcends them. He does so only through the coming of Enkidu.

The prologue proclaims Gilgamesh as the hero, as the king of Uruk, and specifically as one who is wise and knew all things, all countries of the world, and who brought us the tale of the time before the flood engraven on stone. These are significant accolades and features of Gilgamesh. But the story of the Epic is really about how Gilgamesh comes to be these things. For, at first, he is a bad king and is seen as such by the city. How is he a bad king? By lording it over everyone. By using the people of the city and its resources for his own interest. He is an arrogant bully, simply put. The description is a kind of foreshadowing of the questions about justice that Plato wrestles with in The Republic more than twenty-five hundred years later. Does might equal right? Is justice the interest of the stronger as Thrasymachus asserts?

In the Epic, the city mutters against Gilgamesh as not being what a good king should be, namely, and strikingly, as a shepherd to his people. Instead Gilgamesh is more like a wolf devouring the sheep. How does he become a good king and the hero of the culture? Through friendship. The gods form Enkidu to be Gilgamesh’s second self, to be, in short, his friend, one who is his equal; the other in whom he discovers his self and is called to account. In the encounter, Gilgamesh meets someone who stands up to him and challenges his hubris and arrogance. It is the first recorded wrestling match in history; Gilgamesh wins, to be sure; he is the hero but the contest awakens respect. Gilgamesh and Enkidu become close friends.

The thinking of the Epic is clear. In confronting himself in another, Gilgamesh is awakened to the truth of others and his relation to the city undergoes a change, a transformation. Together they go on a great venture outside of the city, facing the fearful uncertainty of the wilderness in the indescribable, because in principle unknowable, figure of Humbaba. They confront the fear of the unknowable, the idea that chaos just might be more powerful than order. Such is the ancient Sumerian world. We might note certain parallels to the fears and uncertainties of our own world.

The death of Enkidu changes Gilgamesh the most and launches him on the greatest journey of the Epic. It is the quest for wisdom. In the death of Enkidu, Gilgamesh confronts his own mortality. He wants to question Utnapishtim concerning life and death. Utnapishtim is the Noah figure of the Epic, a figure who happened to have survived the great flood. The story is far older than the biblical story of the flood and ends with the moral principle with which the Genesis story begins.

Friendship between the gods and humans is a most uncertain matter in the Epic but the idea of the connection between friendship and intellectual and spiritual life is of the greatest significance for the understanding of our humanity. Friendship is one of the great recurring themes in the literary and philosophical traditions of our humanity. One might think of the friendship between Arjuna and Sri Krishna in the Hindu classic, The Bhagavad Gita. In The Books of Samuel of the Hebrew Scriptures we have the wonderful story of the friendship between Jonathan and David: “the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul”. Their friendship acts again as a kind of counter to the arrogance and animosity of Saul towards David. The death of Jonathan affects David greatly: “I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” Such thoughts contribute to a long tradition, sometimes called Platonic love, which saw friendship as a higher form of love than marriage. It will take a poet like John Donne to argue for ‘the heresy’ that there just might be friendship even within marriage.

The friendship between Achilles and Patroclus plays a great role in Homer’s Iliadand ultimately shapes, I think, the touching reconciliation in grief of Achilles and Priam, the father of Hector at the end of that Epic. The theme of the power of friendship is explored by Plato and Aristotle and by Cicero who writes a treatise On Friendship. It is that treatise that Aelred largely has in mind and largely reworks in his treatise on Spiritual Friendship with its bold idea that “God is friendship.”

That idea is shaped in part by Jesus’ saying “I have called you friends” on the eve of his passion. It belongs to the passage in John’s Gospel where Jesus says, “greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.” The friendship between God and man necessarily informs all the forms of human friendship as sacrificial love. The love of God and the love of man are just so tightly bound. Here in Luke’s Gospel, we see the reworking of the ancient theme that friendship is the counter to arrogance and presumption, to the overcoming of animosity. The setting is one of conflict. The Lawyers and Pharisees are watching Jesus, Luke tells us, but how? With hostility and with a view towards catching him out in breaking the Law.

How we look at Jesus ultimately depends on how Jesus looks at us; in short, how God sees us and what God wants for us and from us. The mistake of the Lawyers and Pharisees is to try to tie God to the rules and regulations of the Law while ignoring the greater purpose and meaning of the Law. It is about God’s will for our humanity, our good, in other words, hence the healing on the Sabbath. And so Jesus convicts them of their own hypocrisy and presumption with respect to the interpretation of the Law. The Law is life not death but in reducing the Law to the letter of the Law, we might say, they have utterly ignored the Spirit of the Law which gives it life and without which it is death. They are putting themselves, as it were, above the Law.

Such is pride and presumption captured in the idea of seeking prominence of place and status within the human community, “choos[ing] out the chief seats,” thinking themselves to be better than others and thus ignoring and denying our common humanity. Jesus bids us be humble; only so shall we be exalted and raised up because only so are we open to the truth of God himself and to his will for us.

It takes humility, yes, but such are the lessons of friendship that belong to the truth and dignity of our humanity. True friends seek the good of one another. “Friend, go up higher” is the vocation of our humanity signalled even in our sacramental life, the condition of which is humility both in Baptism and Communion, “walk[ing]” as St. Paul puts it “with all lowliness and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love”, open simply to the truth of God, not “trusting in our own righteousness” but in the “manifold and great mercies” of Christ. We are called to “go up higher,” literally making our way to the altar by ascending into the Chancel after passing under the Rood Screen. We are called to friendship with God and friendship with one another.